2 entries from December 2004

Dec 26, 2004

I just watched "The Bishop's Wife," a light-hearted Christmas flick from 1947 starring Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young, and found it surprisingly moving on several levels. The bullet: David Niven is Bishop Henry Brougham, straining under the burden of trying to raise money for a grand cathedral, Loretta Young is his devoted wife Julia, standing by her man even as she looks back at happier times, and Cary Grant is Dudley, a debonair (shocking, I know) angel who responds to the Bishop's prayer for assistance in an unexpected way.

So why'd I find it so moving? (Lots of spoilers follow, so if you plan to see it, might as well stop reading now.)

1) My current job essentially revolves around fundraising, and, like the Bishop, I've found the task a stressful one. But thanks to Dudley's intercession, a wealthy old widow comes through--not for the cathedral, which is characterized not as a noble undertaking but as a white elephant and a monument to the widow's late husband. Instead, the money will go to food and shelter for the needy, with the Bishop overseeing its disbursement. It sounds a little trite on the page, but in the context of my own professional frustrations, it's a hopeful and encouraging story.

2) Dudley represents both a somewhat challenging and a deeply reassuring spirituality. Even though he appeared in response to the Bishop's prayer, Dudley doesn't simply snap his fingers and grant wishes. In fact, his primary goal is to thwart the Bishop's plans and prevent the construction of the cathedral. The Bishop and the widow don't really want to glorify God with the cathedral--they want to satisfy their own egos, to glorify themselves. Dudley challenges their vision of what's worthwhile and helps them to see that God cares little for monuments--He much prefers small acts of kindness and charity. At the same time, Dudley's a source of comfort to many other characters, in great and small ways--he restores a cab driver's faith in humanity, and he helps the Bishop's daughter win a snowball fight. OK, I realize that Dudley's an angel walking around in a well-tailored suit, so we're not exactly talking Reinhold Niebuhr here. But I've been grappling with my own belief and disbelief lately, and I was affected by the movie's portrayal of a God who comforts the afflicted and (mildly) afflicts the comfortable.

3) The nameless (I think) town is a classically schmaltzy '40s-movie setting. There's St. Timothy's, the sad little church where the bishop got his start and where the choir of urchins sing like, uh, angels. There's the semi-cosmopolitan downtown, with a French restaurant that serves stingers at lunchtime, and the semi-rural rest of town, with a pond-turned-skating-rink. And there's an assortament of neighbors and local characters, led by Prof. Wutheridge, a cheerful, tippling old scholar delightfully portrayed by the ever-reliable Monty Woolley. (Speaking of tippling, when was the last time you saw drinking portrayed in a positive light in a movie or TV show? I'm not suggesting we should gloss over alcoholism as Falstaffian excess, but most people are not alcoholics--they drink responsibly and have a wonderful time doing it. Well, since one of Dudley's minor miracles is a self-filling sherry bottle, I'm going to interpret "The Bishop's Wife" as evidence that the grape is just another of God's creations and was meant to be enjoyed as such.) The sum effect is to root Henry and Julia in a community, where they share a life with people who care about them. Having spent the last 14 years in one neighborhood in San Francisco, I sometimes feel that way, like the other day when our local grocer shared a few brandy-soaked cherries he and a friend had made--and I sometimes feel like just another anonymous worker bee in the modern urban hive.

All in all, one of those great old holiday flicks that does exactly what it was intended to do--lift your spirits while encouraging you to hold yourself (and the world) to a higher moral standard.

That's where I'm living at the moment. Obsessed with copying CDs to iTunes and loading up the iPod. The laptop's getting dangerously full of digital music--it's a three-year-old IBM with something like a 12GB hard disk. Well, I was planning to get a new laptop anyway, because I'm changing jobs--um, I hope I'm changing jobs because my current job is over in about five weeks--and I'll have to hand the trusty IBM over to my successor. But now I'm really anxious to get a new one with a much larger disk so I can keep loading the iPod. I'm shuffling CDs in and out like a freezing man feeding a coal fire.

The impact is comparable to getting my first cell phone in the fall of '99. I got the phones for Amy and myself because I was spending a lot of time in the car, commuting to grad school, and I wanted to make that time more productive. We had actually been holding out for a while--Amy didn't really want work to be able to track her down, and as a student I just didn't feel right spending the money when I didn't have a job. But eventually prices dropped to the point where I felt like the expense was justified, and I picked them up as a surprise for Amy, even though I didn't think we'd use them all that much.

Couldn't be wronger. More wrong? At any rate, the sudden ability to be in touch with each other and the rest of the world at all times, no matter where we were (living 99% of our lives in the cell-tower infested Bay Area) had a tremendous effect. Now that we take that connectivity for granted, it's hard to remember--and perhaps important to remember--how strange it was at first, and how much it changed the way daily life was lived. Where previously you needed to plan so many things in advance, now everything was fluid--you could just make things up on the fly.

That's how I feel about the iPod. I don't need to think about what music I want to listen to in order to have it with me--I essentially just think "What would I like to hear right now, at this moment?" It's much more fluid, more subject to change. This is just an approximation, really, since I'm still in the process of picking out discs--I'm up to the "U's" and so far I've stuck to rock, punk and pop--no jazz, blues or roots. This is because 1) I expect to use the iPod a lot while exercising, and I'll be rocking out, 2) Amy's not listening to much rock anymore, and as a result I listen to less sitting around at home--so I'll be using the iPod to get my fix, and 3) I have a lingering loyalty to some old "records" and I feel the need to carry them around with me--say, Squirrel Bait's "Skag Heaven", even though I probably won't listen to them that much.

I opted for the 20GB model, knowing full well that I'd fill it up pretty quickly, both because I really wanted the lighter, smaller version--these things are pretty dense, and feel surprisingly heavy--and because it was $100 cheaper. So I'm not going to be able to afford having much unlistened-to music on the thing. Given that we mainly listen to jazz and vocals from the 40's-60's (lately more obscure stuff like Helen Merrill, Charlie Byrd, and Chris Connor, but all the standards too, of course) and contemporary roots-y stuff like Jolie Holland and Ollabelle, it'll be interesting to see how much of that makes it onto my iPod.

It'll be interesting to see if the iPod stays a rock refuge or if it increasingly mirrors my at-home listening. I'm guessing it'll be the latter--there's some stuff I just loaded that I already know I won't really be listening to. Yes, I'm talking to you Sebadoh. And "London Calling" will always be on there, but who knows how long "Give 'Em Enough Rope" will stick around?